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Related Flashcards
Cards In This Set
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Empires
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Political entities that contain a substantial geographical space, often many different peoples, and over which a single powerful ruler governs.
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Dynastic states
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States ruled by ‘imperial dynasties’ or ‘dynastic families,’ in which members of a given extended family, over a number of generations, maintain power within a state or empire.
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Feudalism
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A system in which individuals act as ‘vassals’ and receive land in exchange for swearing loyalty to specific highranking leaders (e.g., counts, dukes) and, at the apex of the system, the king.
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Balance of power
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Process by which a state or coalition of states increase their capabilities to prevent the dominance of an opposing state or group of states.
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Peace of Westphalia
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Treaties that ended the Thirty Years War and divided Europe into sovereign states independent of higher authorities.
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Westphalian state system
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The modern state system in which each state is sovereign, with no higher authority (such as a church or empire).
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Concert of Europe
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An agreement among the great powers, beginning in the early nineteenth century, to maintain order collectively within Europe.
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Mercantilism
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A doctrine that states that military power is the central goal of states; such power rests on financial wealth, and the financial wealth of the world is a fixed quantity.
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Colonies
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Areas and people conquered and exploited by a colonizing power over which the colonizer has political and economic control.
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Rum triangle
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A transatlantic trading triangle active in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries between Europe, West Africa, and the Americas.
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Meiji Restoration
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Beginning with the rise of Emperor Meiji in 1868, leaders who set Japan on a course of selective adaptation of Western science, education, and industrial technology for the purposes of strengthening Japan economically and militarily.
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Triple Alliance
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A military alliance finalized in 1882 between Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy sought and signed by Germany to isolate France.
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Triple Entente
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A military alliance finalized in 1907 between France, Britain, and Russia, forming the other pole (countering the Triple Alliance) that divided early twentiethcentury Europe.
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Schlieffen Plan
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A German military plan believed by the Germans to be foolproof in which German forces undertake a massive sweep through Belgium and France and, after outflanking and destroying French forces, then turn east and destroy the Russian army.
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League of Nations
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An international body established by the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I and designed to provide states with an ongoing international legal and institutional framework to solve their disputes and avoid war.
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